Influenza

The government will cease funding "gain-of-function" studies that make viruses more dangerous

Why do some viruses go airborne? Will the pathogen causing the west African outbreak be one of them?

The Ebola outbreak in Western Africa continues to make the news as more cases are reported and casualties rise. A common thread in reporting is the difficulty in communicating accurate information to combat the spread of the virus when communities are gripped with fear and misinformation spreads as quickly as the virus itself.

The retraction represents a setback for those trying to explain a puzzling cluster of sudden-onset narcolepsy reported in 2010 in Europe

So-called gain-of-function pathogen research will likely receive closer scrutiny after three U.S. biolab incidents

My PhD mostly dealt with research blogs from ResearchBlogging.org (RB) an aggregator of blog posts covering peer-reviewed research. In this article, we (Prof.

A global network of clinicians assess the most common diseases among travelers to Brazil, and the winner is surprising

A medical panel now suggests that bulk purchasing of the influenza drug Tamiflu, on which the U.S. has spent $1.5B, was a waste of money

In my last blog post, I said one of the things I like so much about MedlinePlus (a service of the National Library of Medicine, or NLM) is that "the medical librarians at the NLM have already done a lot of the heavy lifting for you." I thought I'd give more detail about what I [...]

Study raises questions over the use of chicken eggs to provide viral strains for flu vaccines.

Tech companies--Facebook, Google and IBM, to name a few--are quick to tout the world-changing powers of "big data" gleaned from mobile devices, Web searches, citizen science projects and sensor networks.